Requiem for a sports section

PL on sports journalism's death by a thousand cuts

Social media is all across the demise of a once-great legacy publisher

The Washington Post sports section, like The New York Times’ before it, is no more. The Times axed its sports department and outsourced its reporting to The Athletic in 2023. The Post’s sports journalists, editors and sub-editors were among 300 sacked mid-week as the billionaire Jeff Bezos scaled back his commitment to the paper that is not alone in its struggle to navigate the headwinds of a broken business model.

The institution, whose motto had been Democracy Dies in the Darkness, also had to deal with the defection of an estimated 250,000 subscribers when management spiked its editorial board’s support for the Democrats at the last election.

The Post will, however, keep on a skeleton staff to cover sport as a “cultural and societal phenomenon” in the features section.

“This is obviously a uniquely difficult and incredibly difficult decision. Our sports coverage is often supurb, our sports writers are among the most talented in our business. Sports has a very proud legacy at the post. Unfortunately, we are grappling with just major changes in the way sports news is delivered, shared and experienced across the industry,” an executive editor told the Post staff in a group call on Wednesday.

The Post’s bullshit was only knee-deep in comparison to The Times' chin-deep explanation of its intentions when it sacked its sports department.

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s readers three years ago “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

These are dark days for sports coverage in mainstream media, and there’s a great sadness about this. They are desperate times, too, in an industry that’s financially stricken and one that’s struggled unsuccessfully to find a business model for the changed times.

Everyone is poorer because of this.

Michael Miller, The Post’s Sydney correspondent, confirmed on Thursday that he was one of the 300 in a post on social media that said “I’ve lost my job. Worse, millions of readers will lose my colleagues’ brilliant coverage. At a time of tumult, we need more info, not less”.

Nobody was underestimating the significance of the sackings. The Atlantic reported on the mass layoffs under the banner The Murder of The Washington Post. Many words have and are still to be written about the decline of the paper famed for its dogged pursuit of the Watergate scandal, but more recently beset by scandals over its editorial direction under the government-appeasing Jeff Bezos. Former executive editor Martin Baron, the journalist in charge of The Post when it won 11 Pulitzer Prizes, told The New Yorker that the latest round of sackings “ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organisations”. The decimation of the sports section will not and should not receive as much attention as what is happening on the front pages, the foreign bureaus of these publications, the arts section and the like, but should not pass lightly.

Don Graham, The Post’s former publisher and a man who himself once edited the paper’s sports section, posted on Facebook.

“I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”

Remember reading a newspaper from the back first? Remember reading a physical newspaper? I know I stopped buying newspapers at least a decade ago, having moved my consumption to digital platforms. Once journalists arrived with the papers under their arms, over the years, fewer and fewer found their way into the press boxes at sporting venues. Of late, it is almost impossible to find a single copy, and it’s not like somebody can ask to borrow your subscription …